{"id":130,"date":"2007-06-28T14:34:14","date_gmt":"2007-06-28T14:34:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/archives\/130"},"modified":"2007-06-29T18:00:27","modified_gmt":"2007-06-29T18:00:27","slug":"constitution-trinitarianism-part-1-ned-and-lumpy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/constitution-trinitarianism-part-1-ned-and-lumpy\/","title":{"rendered":"Constitution Trinitarianism Part 1: Ned and Lumpy"},"content":{"rendered":"

The next theory up to bat is by philosophers Mike Rea<\/a> of Notre Dame and Jeff Brower<\/a> of Purdue University<\/strong>. In some ways Mike reminds me of his mentor Al Plantinga<\/a> – a tall guy you don’t want to argue against unless you absolutely have to. He’s published many articles in metaphysics and philosophy of religion, and is perhaps best known for this book<\/a>. He’s presently editing several books, including one of recent essays on the Trinity, which I’m really looking forward to seeing. Jeff is one of the best medieval philosophy specialists around, focusing on metaphysics, philosophy of religion, and ethics. I think he has excellent tastes<\/a> in medieval philosophers. Both of these guys are top-notch, and you’ll always learn a lot from anything they publish. Both of them, by the way, have many papers available to download from their websites, and their other Trinity work will surely be discussed here at some future date. The one I’ll be discussing in this series is here<\/a>. Theirs is a bold and controversial theory, and one which is quite out of step<\/strong> with the Social Trinitarian views that have been so popular of late.<\/p>\n

“Material Constitution and the Trinity”<\/strong> (Faith and Philosophy<\/em> 22:1, Jan 2005, 57-76) is a difficult and technical article, dense with argument. Philosophers will appreciate how well it’s crafted; I not sure many others can get through it! Here I’ll just lay out the broad lines of it, getting slightly more precise in future installments. Consider Ned the gnome:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

How many things are pictured here?<\/strong> <\/p>\n

You might say just one – a gnome statue – but many philosophers say there are at least two, the other being the lump of clay of which Ned is made – call it Lumpy. Lumpy existed, in some sort of blobbish form, before it came to constitute Ned. And if we annihilate Ned, by say crushing him flat with a ten-ton weight, Lumpy may still exist (now in a very flat form). And possibly (maybe this is less obvious) we could modify Ned by replacing his parts one after another, so that it is no longer Lumpy which constitutes<\/strong> Ned, but instead some new quantity of clay.<\/p>\n

As different things are true of them, we know that Lumpy and the statue Ned can’t be identical<\/a>. But Brower and Rea would say that the two, though not identical, are “numerically the same”. So even though Lumpy and Ned are non-identical, the correct answer to “How many things are in the picture?” is: one<\/strong>. This, they admit, is odd, but they insist that any plausible metaphysics of material objects is going to say odd, unintuitive things sooner or later. (61-7)<\/p>\n

What’s this got to do with the Trinity? Just this. They’re suggesting that God is related to each of the divine persons somewhat<\/em> as Lumpy is related to Ned.<\/strong> As they put it, the divine essence eternally has the three properties of being a Father, being a Son, and being a Spirit, giving rise to three non-identical persons. They are, however, to be counted as one God, for they are all constituted by the same divine essence. (68-9) The divine essence “constitutes” each of the persons. None of the Three is identical to God, though each is “numerically the same” as the one God.<\/strong> (70) This theory, they claim, meets any reasonable desiderata for an orthodox doctrine of the Trinity, one consonant with natural readings of the Bible and the ecumenical creeds. (58-9, 70) Further, this solution isn’t plucked from thin air; they hold that common sense pushes us to believe that some things are constituted by others, and that there’s such a thing as numerical sameness without identity.<\/p>\n

Technorati Tags: constitution trinitarianism<\/a>, Mike Rea<\/a>, Jeff Brower<\/a>, lump and statue<\/a>, identity<\/a>, numerical sameness<\/a>, material constitution<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The next theory up to bat is by philosophers Mike Rea of Notre Dame and Jeff Brower of Purdue University. In some ways Mike reminds me of his mentor Al Plantinga – a tall guy you don’t want to argue against unless you absolutely have to. He’s published many articles in metaphysics and philosophy of… Read More »Constitution Trinitarianism Part 1: Ned and Lumpy<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-130","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-philosophy","category-theories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=130"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}